It could work the opposite way. Remember the '90's Assault weapons ban? Columbine happened while the weapons were banned.... when it was time to renew it, the message was "this didn't prevent Columbine, it's worthless".

Maybe when the warrantless snooping laws are up for review, someone will point out that it didn't prevent the Boston Bombing (or whatever it gets called) and it will expire with just as little fanfare.

However none of this is going to happen until we stop reelecting company politicians who appoint company bureaucrats

Can you list the company politicians currently in office? Who is the worst? What district? What kind of election opposition do they have?

We're not going to stop re-electing "company politicians" until it begins to be widespread public knowledge which politicians are the worst offenders, and then the time to get them out of office is the primary. (Amost) nobody votes in congressional primaries, and by so doing we are abdicating our responsibility to get these people out of office.

A simple high-profile campaign to defeat a "bought and paid for" politician (say, Lamar Smith, author of SOPA?) in the primary--with funding, planning, and Net-wide effort (similar to the level of effort used to defeat SOPA) would signal a tidal change in the forces of politics. It would be like Scott Brown's primary victory was for the Tea Party... lawmakers pay attention to people who can put them out of jobs by way of the primaries.

Before the advent of cheap quality weighted electronic musical keyboards, pianists would use piano keyboards that made no sound for practicing. I think you'd have to be pretty advanced before this became something of value though.

Or is anybody here naive enough to believe that nobody will want to fill the incredibly lucrative market which Google appears ready to abandon?

You mean that of a "good search engine?"

Google used to be the good search engine. They've already abandoned it. Do a search for a monetize-able term like "insurance." You'll get 7 ads before you get a single search result. Google is an ad engine, not a search engine.

I switched my Chrome bar to duckduckgo a few months ago... I don't have anything against Google. They make a great browser, awesome web mail, and cars that drive themselves. But their search engine is no longer of quality... this isn't even a "final nail", just yet another symptom.

I develop on a Dell laptop now and I run windows on it. I run Ubuntu 12 LTS in a virtualbox rather than as the main OS because I really like hot-dock capability, and it has never worked right in Linux. With Windows (7) I can hit that button and go to a meeting, snap it back in and have my dual-big-screen developer workstation. Devs aren't going to work on a single screen, so why bother with a high-res one?

The screen is so you can take notes, and check a server or DB from a meeting when you're away from your desk. The dock and the 2 roomy monitors that accompany it are for the real task of development.

If they can't support smooth docking and undocking (hopefully better than Win7--I would love for it to put my window positions back where they were last time I was docked) then this product will be a flop with me. Am I the only dev who thinks in terms of docking?

Why are we signing petitions? It's primary election season. Let's make an example of one of the congressmen-for-hire.

the Tea Party came to power when Scott Brown defeated an incumbent in a primary contest. Let's get an incumbent SOPA supporter out of office because he supported SOPA.

Primary congressional elections are where the real electoral power is... and we have a tendency to ignore them. I believe that nothing less than a primary loss from a SOPA or PIPA supporter would get their attention.

The problem is they get $50,000 for their campaign fund for supporting it. The solution, obviously, is to make it cost them more than $50,000 worth of publicity for supporting it.

Lamar Smith, who introduced SOPA, is currently running uncontested for the Republican Primary in his district.

This is good. The next step is to keep Lamar Smith from getting re-elected. Right now he's running unopposed for the republican nomination in a district that includes parts of Austin, a very techie town. With the right amount of national support for "Anybody but Lamar Smith" he can and should lose his seat over this.

Chrome has at least one deal-killer bug for me: under certain circumstances it works very poorly on google websites.

Knowing what I do about their technology, my guess is the problem happens when overzealous corporate firewalls block SPDY requests, but it could be something else --- I don't know the cause, but the effect is that anything that hits a google page, or anything that loads google ads or google analytics (i.e., most of the internet) hangs indefinitely in Chrome.

That has kept me from making Chrome my "only" browser. But I also like firebug in firefox, and some things, like the Charles plugin work much better in FF... so what happens for me is, I have two or three browsers open at once constantly, and compartmentalize things...

Chrome - documentation browser. I load docs related to dev in chrome, and also gmail if I'm on a network where google apps aren't hanging

Opera - casual / non-work-related browser. Opera is kind of a sucky browser compared to other options. By using it for non-work-related activity, I can ensure that I don't enjoy screwing around all day.

There is theoretically other room for Safari or IE, for testing or debugging browser specific problems, but since I have tons of tabs and windows open of each browser, using different browsers simplifies the alt-tab switching between modes of working.

And... because I have multiple browsers installed and switch between them, this is a flexible plan. New browser comes along? I'll give it a shot. Get tired of some bug in a browser? pop up another one.

That said, for a while now Chrome has been the "browser upgrade" I put on my friends and family's computers for a while now. If Firefox is better though, that will change.

The name of the company is Microsoft. Microcomputer Software. The old way of looking at computing is desktop computers. It worked very well for them when desktop computers worked, because that was the company. The new (and most likely, long-term future) way of looking at computing is the Internet. Microsoft never really got the Internet. IE only became significant years late, and only because of the desktop OS monopoly. Bing probably won't.

I'm guessing what GP intended to say is 400,000 is the population Foxconn employs in Shenzen... that is, 10 out of 400k Foxconn employees have committed suicide in the past year, vs 45 out of 400,000 Americans.

There are other factors, like age, that come into play here, but if the facts are fairly even, this is a non-story. I've worked at an American company with 3,000 employees, and one of them committed suicide in 4 years I worked there... If I'm doing the math right, that is the equivalent of 33 suicides per 400,000 employees per year. Napkin-math says it's a non-story.

However political parties leader will not waver too far off their ideology core as the group in the hole still follows that ideology.

Occams razor says "divide and conqueror" makes more sense to explain why we have two political parties.

I disagree... you're assigning malicious intent to some unnamed entity and judging its motives. I think a much simpler explanation is the two-party system is simply emergent behavior from the U.S.'s winner-take-all system of electing representativess. In governments where the leaders are selected differently, you have different results.

There are also a number of different ways of determining the outcome of the vote, but just changing the balloting process would undermine the lock that the two-party system has in the U.S.

Which is why it won't happen. The one thing democrats and republicans will work together on is to stop anything that would enable the rise of a third (or more) party. They will use every legal trick, and probably more than few illegal ones, to stop this.

The only way this is going to change is for the american voters to wake up and start voting in mass for third party and independent candidates, especially the ones with little campaign funding. That campaign funding comes with some serious strings attached...

I hate to say it, but this is why it's never going to change. As the advertising industry has known for years, and as Coca-Cola bases its business model on, changing the minds of the masses is simply a matter of spending enough money.

As long as people consume entertainment that they don't pay for (such as television, radio, and most websites for that matter) people are going to consume advertising, opening a portion of their minds to the highest bidder. As long as people freely offer their minds to the highest bidder in exchange for a sitcom, phony partisan "news" report or video of a cat falling off a TV, the ones with the most money (read: the establishment) is going to have the most influence the masses.

The only thing that might change that is if people start starving or otherwise feeling primal physical discomfort as a result of the establishment / status quo keeping on doing what they're doing. That's a possibility, but not one that I hope for.

Have you looked at politics any time in the past half-century? In established democracies, freedom is considered dangerous, and most regulations are established with a clear goal of limiting freedom in the name of safety, conformity, or reduced liability.